The pretty blond woman is plucking at the bristles of a hairbrush with gold-manicured fingertips, tapping her nails softly against the wooden handle as she holds it close to a microphone. Bathed in soft lighting, she smiles knowingly into the video camera, as if sharing a secret.

How does it end? Every living being conscious of his own mortality imagines what it will be like. Our minds, perhaps understandably, create from scant, dubious hopes, unrealistic, bordering on delusional, scenarios for the hour of our deaths: in our...